Come you Spirits, Unsex me Here: Contemporary Theatre and African Ceremonies as a Playground for Alternative Masculinities
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Cotonou, Guelede 2019
Amsterdam Sunjata 2010
Come you Spirits, Unsex me Here: Contemporary
Theatre and African Ceremonies as a Playground
for Alternative Masculinities
Javier López Piñón
May 2021
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3
Table of content
1. Abstract 4
2. Introduction 5
2.0 Composing a polyphonic/polyrhythmic argument: switching
between the global north and the global majority
2.1 Masculinities and the stage
2.2 Masculinity studies and the black body
2.3 Hegemonic masculinity and homosexuality
2.4 Observations on gender role fluidity in West Africa
3. Three theatre seasons 2018-2020: masculinity intersecting with "race": 22
Giovanni's room/Heritage-Redo/Patroon/Een leven lang sex/
Between us/Allegria
3.1 A choice of five spectacles
A. My heart into my mouth
B. They/them
C. White noise
D. Making Men
E. Notre Aujourd'hui
Conclusions 31
Intermezzo: my gay gaze 33
Centrefold: Alternative masculinities in contemporary visual arts 38
4. This is a man's world: female masks, male dancers, cross-dressing 43
and gender identity exchange in West African performance practices
4.1 Gender identities: changing tunes
4.2.Gender and local performance practices: between impersonation and
transformation
I. Female impersonation
II. Male to female transformation through masked dance
A. Yorouba B. Baulé C. Chokwe D. Baga
Igbo, Dan, Punu and others
III. Identity obliteration through spiritual possession
Hausa
Conclusions 70
5. Intercultural playgrounds: performing alternative masculinities 73
Further research
Bibliography and picture sources 83
Annexes
4
1. Abstract
This thesis aims on one level to discuss masculinity intersecting with the way the male black
body is presented on stage in recent theatre/dance performances and on another, it researches
performance practices in West Africa for their portrayal of gender roles. Looking a number of
recent productions on the topic in Holland, Belgium, France-Ivory Coast and Bénin, a
panorama of masculinities is painted in the first chapters. Further chapters aim to compare
this phenomenon with local performance practices in (mainly Francophone) West Africa
within the framework of the very lively masked ceremonies and ritual manifestations, both
religious as well as profane, that are still part and parcel of society in West Africa. Perhaps
surprisingly, I set out to demonstrate that a more fluid perception of gender roles is to be
detected in that society through these local performance practices, and that this might
compare to the work of diasporic artists who explore masculinities in their contemporary
productions, thus creating new, alternative types of masculinity.
The first half of the paper examines recent contemporary dance/theatre productions
where Afro descendant and diasporic theatre artists have engaged with masculinity at the
intersection with "race"1. Through interviews with the creators, a possible interface is created
between European and West African performance practices concerning their views of
masculinity.
Halfway through, a birds' eye view of recent developments in (mainly, but not
exclusively diasporic) visual arts and design, where very similar tendencies in the portrayal
of masculinity can be detected, is presented under the heading "Centrefold".
The second half focuses on performance practices in West Africa, including one
example from the south-west; they seem to point to a concept of masculinity, different from
what has been defined as hegemonic masculinity in Europe. Examples from this practice are
discussed that point to a complementary concept of gender instead of a conflicting binary:
instead of two oppositional irreconcilable and fixed poles directly identifiable through their
sex, as the gender binary is conceptualised in the global north, in the global south we're
dealing with a continuum where the male and the female are conceived in terms of roles and
functions in society, where they're not oppositional but complementary.
The paper concludes that the theatre offers the perfect intercultural and transnational
playground for these ambitions and points to further developments that have been set in
motion in contemporary theatre practice. The black male body is reviewed as a site for
alternative masculinities both in the context of societies that form part of the global majority
as well as those belonging to the global north.
Thus, besides discussing the possibility of contributing philosophies that are related to
local West African performance practices to contemporary dance/theatre, the article also
intends to help filling a gap in research on masculinity and the performing arts in a
marginalised region which is francophone West Africa. This will in the future lead to an
ongoing research, where gender fluidity will be mapped as it is expressed through cross-
dressing and gender identity switching in masked as well as trance ceremonies, celebrations,
and liturgies in a wide range of local performance practices. Theoretically, I hope to uncover
a non-colonial gender-fluid philosophy in that part of the continent, that has survived and has
been imbricated with imported religious and ideological dimensions accompanying Arabic
and European slave-trade and subsequent colonisation. Through this process, a sub-Saharan
Africa has been created as a colonial construct that has stripped the local gender fluid
approaches on the continent of its dynamic accoutrements, reducing it to the poverty of
1throughout this article the word is used reluctantly as it does not refer to a reality but to a construct that has
brought disastrous and disruptive worldwide results called racism, which still is a very manifest reality.
5
oppositional binary thinking and its ideology, but in spite of this ongoing process, pockets of
the non-oppositional complementary approach have survived and are still functioning.
2. Introduction
Anthropological writing may be scientific, it is also inherently autobiographic.
Johannes Fabian
2.0 Composing a polyphonic/polyrhythmic argument: switching between the global north and
the global majority
The topic of this thesis is the way masculinities are presented in very disparate performance
practices. The question investigated can be summed up as: can West African so-called
traditional performance practices present a playground for alternative masculinities
comparable to recent Afro European contemporary dance performances?
Classification, taxonomy, categorisation: the global north obviously loves to sort
things out. The well-made play might epitomise this as it reflects an extremely ordered view
of the world where every element in the end finds (or is allotted) its proper fixed place.
Theatre studies until the last quarter of the previous century were centred around
hermeneutics and only since then a paradigm shift has taken place, where the performative is
foregrounded as opposed to the logocentric approach. Postdramatic theatre (as this theatre has
been baptised by Lehman in 1999) has favoured the non-logocentric aspects, creating
spectacles where the main roles are reserved for images, sounds, music, immersive
experiences and finally has explored (and continues to explore) a whole range of other-
purpose spaces adapted to theatrical events. This development also has immense
consequences for acting styles and audience involvement. Through the reappropriation of the
theatrical, it can be argued that it has reconnected to its global origins: the ludic event as
already depicted in ancient cave paintings throughout Africa and Europe.
Not only has this led to a new dramaturgy for the theatre of the global north, it also
has taught theatre scholars to develop new standards in the way African theatrical events had
been so far evaluated and this had led to a stream of publications about all kind of theatrical
practices on the continent (especially the Anglophone part of it).
This thesis is an attempt to bring very different worlds together. As the thesis covers
relatively new ground, connections will be proposed between the world of contemporary
Afropean dance performance and West African dance and performance practices. The topic
covers among others the field of anthropology, performance theory, ethnography, sociology,
gender studies and visual arts, and it will be imperative to rely on a range of methods proper
to this broad set of disciplines. Next to interviews and participatory observation, appropriate
literature will be researched; performance analysis through dance scholarship shall be called
upon, queer theory will be included in the approach of the topic.
The possible danger of a methodological hotchpotch will partly be avoided through a
critical attitude and partly acknowledged as a consequence of the imbrication of cultures,
characteristic of post-colony. Hence, a chapter at the heart of the thesis has been unavoidable
on subjectivity: for this thesis I claim my gay gaze as the heuristic tool that serves to string
together all the different themes into a coherent composition.
The foremost disciplines to call upon will be performance studies and anthropology.
The birth of performance studies as a separate discipline has from the outset maintained a
strong link to anthropology, Schechner and Turner's work being at the base of the new
discipline. And besides anthropology and performance studies, so far references have
already been made to the fields of sociology, gender studies, art criticism, queer theory,
6
showing that this research is by definition multi- as well as inter-disciplinary. In certain
cases, literary fiction will be referred to and of course performance theory with references to
Carlson, Fischer-Lichte, Schechner besides the work of dance scholars like Cools will be
useful to the approach of the topic. References to visual art studies will be unavoidable, as
masks (including costume and paraphernalia) have been evaluated from the point of view of
visual arts as well as anthropological research; Fraser and Nooter Roberts among others have
looked into the link between the visual aesthetics and the cosmological, philosophical and
mythological values expressed through them; in fact, a visual essay will pose as a centrefold
in this study.
When calling upon gender studies, the focus will deliberately be on European and
African studies rather than on US research. The reason for focusing rather on
European/African research into masculinity, especially at the intersection with "race", is
because of the discursive hegemony which characterises this topic in Academia: the big
majority of research on this matter is from the US and cannot (or only partly) be transposed
to situations outside the US. Parallels, similarities, discrepancies, between both sides of the
Atlantic as well as the influence of feminist conceptions of gender (and "race"): these
elements have to be taken into account in order to cover the topic in its complexity. Charl
Landvreugd stresses this fact in his paper elaborating on the issue with a focus to the visual
art and the position of Afro-Dutch artists; in a way this paper seeks to support that stance
with a view to the performing arts. 2
Local performance practices have been foremost a research area of anthropology and
sociology, although the number of performance studies on these practices is rapidly
increasing (the ongoing publication of the African Theatre and Performative Interactions in
African Theatre series are examples of the growing interest in the topic). Performance studies
as a discipline has from the start with the pioneering Richard Schechner in 1980 always
entertained a close link with ethnography and throughout these chapters there will be regular
references to concepts and theoretical aspects on the intersection ethnography/performance
practices. This study wants to take on board what has been suggested by leading scholars (the
last one being Lamp in Bouttiaux that the kinesthetics of the mask "(...)is as important as
formal analysis or iconology" and the study of African masks should be reframed as theatre
or performance studies instead of art history.3
In the context of this thesis, performance practices in West-Africa are resolutely
considered as performance art. This has not been done before as the study of masked
performances only recently has entered into the arena of performance studies, and so far,
these practices have not been under consideration as performance art. For the sake of
argument, it might be interesting to compare Abramovic's famous performance Lips of
Thomas, which is the starting point of Fischer-Lichte's study on performance art, with the
vodun practice of the koku rite, where the participating adepts cut their bodies with sharp
knives. Abramovic's performance, which took place in 1975 in a gallery in Innsbruck,
consisted (among other actions of self-torture) of the artist cutting her own abdomen with a
razor blade, while the audience looked on for half an hour before interrupting the
performance.4 The immediate differences between Abramovic's and the koku rite's
performance that come to the mind are:
2
Landvreugd, "Notes on imagining Afropea." Open Arts Journal 5 no.1 (2016): 12."(...) the salient theoretical
frameworks and art histories that have characterised such counter-modernity during the past century need to be
brought under further scrutiny to ensure that the local gets the chance to develop on its own terms".
3
Anne-Marie Bouttiaux, La Dynamique des Masques en Afrique Occidentale/Dynamics of Masks in West Africa
(Tervuren, RMCA, 2013), 100.
4 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (Abingdon: Routledge,
2008), 11-13.
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• In performance art, it is the initiative of an individual artist that leads to the
performance. In ritual practice like vodun koku it is an initiative shared by a
community.
• The access to the performance is public-on-condition in the first case and
only for the initiated in the second one, although one could discuss the
flexibility of this rule.
• In any case the economics of the performance are totally different.
• A further distinction: the audience becomes participant in the first case
without they're being informed of the process on forehand, they have to
choose and adapt their stance individually during the performance, while in
the second case the participants are on forehand well aware of the process,
they have in fact chosen to undergo its power. If a member of Abramovic's
audience decided to come back for a second time, this would affect this
argument at its core.
Thus, the transformative power of performance is definitely working for the participants in
both cases, but I'm sure performance studies would hesitate to categorise vodun koku
practices with performance art. One might easily agree on the performative aspect, but the
doubts would be about the artistic intentions. The very different contexts are probably the
cause of this distinction, but on the other hand: the postdramatic turn in theatre 5 might also be
considered a return to theatre as it was before drama became the central constituent of the
theatre paradigm in the Global North: Lehmann has introduced the term in 1999 to signal an
important shift in theatrical practices that has been going on since the last quarter of the
previous century. This shift foregrounds the non-textual theatrical elements at the expense of
the verbal element, which is confined to the theatre form that can be defined as drama, thus
opening the way to a new relationship with the audience. Postdramatic theatre stresses the
event itself, bringing together performers and audiences under specific conditions, where
drama creates the illusion of reality, and thus invites the famous phenomenon called the
suspension of disbelief. Postdramatic theatre does not represent reality, it creates reality and
thus reconnects it with its non-dramatic origin. It may not come as a surprise that early
attempts at postdramatic theatre were connected to the idea of ritual and ceremony:
Schechner and Turner are the obvious names to refer to in this case. 6 Postdramatic theatre
practices in the global north and African ceremonies and rituals share basic foundations.
5
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, transl. Karen-Jürs-Munby (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006).
6
Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ, 1987); Richard Schechner, Between
Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985).
8
(anonymous photo, Cotonou 2008 )
The author together with Koku adept; the scars
of the Koku sessions are very visible on the adept's chest.
When discussing alternative masculinities, it will be necessary to refer to queer theory and
queer performance practices; a parallel development in design, fashion, photography, and
performance art, partly created by the African diaspora and partly on the continent itself has
been instrumental in creating images of alternative masculinities and contentious
presentations of the male black body. Aesthetic manifestations of queer activity seem much
more visible for the anglophone countries as compared to the francophone: all the
contributions to the Queer Africa collection of stories published in 2018 are exclusively from
anglophone countries on the continent. A comparable anthology from the francophone area
has to my knowledge not seen the light (yet).
To my regret, I did not find many examples of academic research into concepts of
masculinity in West African francophone societies. In an article in 2002 Lahoucine Ouzagane
could still maintain that "(...) the scholarship on gender in Africa continues to operate as
though gender applied only to women, as though African men had no gender."7 Even as late
as 2016, Schulz and Janson maintain that "(...)scholarship on gender in Africa is still marked
by the tendency to describe men as an unmarked, universal category" and this seems to be
especially the case for the francophone part. 8 To illustrate this, a few representative
examples: Uchendu's bilingual work on Masculinities/Masculinités published in 2008
contains fourteen chapters, of which just only one is dedicated to a region in francophone
West Africa: southern Togo; it contains four further articles discussing other French speaking
regions on the continent as widely separated from each other as possible: Congo Brazzaville
and the Mahgreb. Another example: the Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines issued a comprehensive
volume fifty-three (eighteen articles) on masculinities covering the whole of the continent,
Masculin Pluriel in 2013; Mali gets adequate attention with four articles and there is one
single article on Niger. 9
7
Introduction to special issue "African Masculinities," The Journal of Men's Studies 10 no.3 (2002): 243.
8 Introduction to special issue "Religion and Masculinities in Africa," Journal of Religion in Africa 46 no.2-3
(2016): 121-3.
9
"Pourquoi n’y retrouve-t-on pas par exemple, aux côtés des incontournables études féministes (Christine
Delphy, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Paola Tabet), une référence à un article aussi essentiel que « Guerre des sexes
à Abidjan : masculin, féminin, CFA » (Vidal 1977b) ? De même certains volumes collectifs sur les masculinités
9
Part six of the comprehensive reader African Sexualities, which is dedicated to sex
and masculinities contains eight chapters (including a blog and two poems), none of which
addresses a Francophone region (actually the entire reader is heavily toppling over to the
Anglophone countries).
In the passing, Viveros Vigoya reaches the same conclusion concerning the lack of
research into the Francophone areas in her exemplary documented study on Latin American
intersectional masculinities. 10 In her study I found the most pertinent observations and
analyses on the intersection of masculinity and "race" in a postcolonial and diasporic context.
The black male body in a majoritarian white environment will inevitably develop the double
consciousness already articulated by W.E.B. Dubois at the beginning of the twentieth century
and Viveros Vigoya lists the strategies adopted under these circumstances. In the chapters on
the contemporary theatre performances in this essay, her observations will provide a suitable
framework.
The process through which dancers have to go in order to become incarnations of the
mask has not been researched from the point of view of gender studies. Some rudimentary
notions are discussed,11 like the use of drugs ("medicine") in preparation for the performance,
or the preparatory training in the exclusive domain of male initiation. Schechner has written
about transformations in a wide range of ritual contexts in general terms ("all transformations
are incomplete"), Turner has elaborated the central element of liminality, but this has not
taken into account the ontology of the gender as a separate topic. Bouttiaux in her article on
Guro mask practices 12 does mention the kinetic talent necessary to become a (female) mask
wearer, but does not elaborate on the topic and instead, stresses the dangers involved for the
wearer and his family from possible spiritual opposition: mask dancing can be a risky
undertaking.
A number of local performance practices in West Africa have been thoroughly
researched by leading scholars. Practices from Bénin/Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Togo, Niger,
Burkina Faso of which detailed studies based on solid fieldwork have been published; they
have been scrutinised for this thesis on the gender-crossing aspect and a (non-exhaustive) list
of comparable practices elsewhere on the continent is included as an illustration of the extent
to which the phenomenon is spread. But none of the studied researches addresses separately
the topic of the transformation of the male performer into a female (id)entity. The
(sub)question I would like to address then is: how, through what means does the dancer
arrive at the appropriation of a female identity, and what does that mean for the performer.
2.1 Masculinities and the stage
I don't have much with me. In my ears I always wear my yin yang-earrings. Everyone has two sides, you just
have to find them.
Martin Kes, 35 years old homeless man
in an interview for De Straatkrant.
If the European theatre of the nobility in 18th century put life on stage as it should be, if the
bourgeois theatre of the 19th demanded an escape from life and the theatre of the democratic
récemment publiés en français ont choisi d’écarter toute contribution sur l’Afrique." Christophe Broqua et Anne
Doquet, "Penser les masculinités en Afrique et au delà." Cahiers d'études Africaines 53 no. 209-210 (2013): 4.
10
Mara Viveros Vigoya, Les couleurs de la masculinité. (Paris: La Découverte, 2018), 50.
11 Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and
Ritual(Cambridge: CUP, 1990); Thompson Drewal, Yoruba ritual: Performers, Play, Agency Bloomington:
IUP, 1992; Benedict Ibitokun, Dance as Ritual Drama and Entertainment in the Gelede of the Ketu-Yoruba
subgroup in West Africa (Ile-Ife: Obafemi Awolowo UP, 1993).
12 Bouttiaux, La Dynamique, 125.
10
20th century aspired to interpret the realities of life, contemporary theatre is perhaps looking
for a way to transform life. The stage has inevitably been a platform for the display of human
behaviour and always follows (and often precedes) major changes in behaviour that reflect
changes in society. The contemporary stage has shown recent examples where the gender
binary is effaced. Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen has created a number of
performances (Red Pieces) where it is impossible to discern gender in the dancers that
perform. In Schönheitsabend, and other spectacles, Austrian/Dutch performers Holzinger and
Riebeek perform gender functions freely distributed regardless of the "appropriate" sex. Even
if the radicality of these performances can be considered a very recent phenomenon, gender
fluidity has been a theme presented on stage as well as in the visual arts of the past century.
Duchamp's alter ego Rrose Selavy comes to mind, like Sarah Bernard performing as Hamlet
or Féral Benga performing as Josephine Baker. But it's only from the last quarter of the
previous century that the attention given to this topic has developed into the proportions it has
taken nowadays, especially in dance/movement/mime/performance art environment.
In West-Africa this gender fluidity is a standard element in masked and trance
ceremonies throughout the region and far beyond, but this has not been signalled nor
researched as thoroughly as could be expected, taking into consideration the attention the
topic is receiving by performing artists in the global north. This research wants to address this
lack of attention by comparing both performance practices from the point of view of the
portrayal of masculinity. Of course, if we focus on the black body, there is a vital difference
that has to be taken into account concerning the black male body on stage: in the global
north, it is in a minority position while in West Africa it is the opposite, which entails very
different contexts and consequently a different set of values; the fact that this research is
undertaken by an old white gay male will be foregrounded whenever appropriate, as the gay
gaze figuring at the centre of this text has been active in the observation and appreciation of
the performances discussed. This research is being undertaken at a time when a substantial
paradigm shift is finally (hopefully) taking place: the world-wide protests against racism that
are still going on after the violent death of George Floyd are expected to lead to important
changes in societies in the Global North. By comparing the two performance practices for
this research, I hope to contribute to the un-othering of the sub-Saharan part of the African
continent, in agreement with Chabal that the international (not limited to European) view of
the continent as an exceptional "case" should be reviewed thoroughly.13
2.2 Masculinity studies and the black body
In the global north, matters related to masculinity have shown a wealth of new approaches to
the oppositional gender binary, especially at the intersection of masculinity and "race".
Intercultural theatre (or whatever terminology one wishes to handle) has rapidly developed
into an entity of its own in the (dance)theatre landscape in Europe. The African diaspora has
produced a growing number of leading choreographers, theatre personalities, authors, thus
offering new visions of masculinity through the presentation of the male black body. In this
paper, I will approach half a dozen of these productions from Holland, Belgium, Bénin,14
Sénégal and France/Côte d'Ivoire focusing on the masculinities they portray or propose.
Since its definition by Connell15 hegemonic masculinity has been nuanced and criticized and
reframed16 but it remains a very practical term.
13
Patrick Chabal, Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling (London: Zed Books, 2009), 18-22.
14
For this thesis the French spelling of names will generally be applied.
15
Raewyn Connell, Masculinities. Second Edition. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 77.
16
Tim Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 58.11
In general, hegemonic masculinity is recurrently defined in the literature by the
following cluster of characteristics, with either a positive or a negative connotation: "strength,
control, power," "bravery, leadership, endurance," "sexual force, bravura."17 Violence as an
alarming constitutive element is probably its most researched separate topic.18 Viveros
Vigoya, next to giving an overview of studies related to this topic, also points to another
important decisive element, which needs special attention because of the ravages the neo-
liberal revolution has brought about on the continent in this respect: his ability to be a
"pourvoyeur de ressources et chef de famille"19 to which we need to add the display of
"contrôle émotionnel et la rivalité avec les autres hommes (...)."20 She cites Editberto Barreto
of the Colombian Macho Movement who maintains that a man can be rightly called
masculine if he shows the following behaviour: "actes agressifs contre sa beau-mère, faire
objet des plaintes pour harcèlement sexuel ou refuser d'assumer les obligations liées à
l'entretien des enfants en cas de séparation, frapper les femmes quand elles n'obéissent pas."21
Competitiveness has to be added as perhaps one of the most typical attributes of masculinity,
inscribed on the male psyche from the earliest moments, even when the body is still not
shaped as genuinely masculine (i.e. able to reproduce).22
Focusing on black masculinity specifically: this is a topic that has been researched
especially in the context of the situation in the US, to such an extent that it is a take that is
becoming hegemonical by itself in literature. Robert Staples in the eighties of last century,
David Marriott at the turn of the century, feminist researchers white as well as of colour:
Edwards (2006) critically reviews the corpus of works on the topic. The most often recurring
black male stereotypes are "hypersexual and aggressive" (Enguix), "selon les stéréo typiques:
êtres dionysiaques centrés sur le plaisir obtenu par la consommation d'alcool, la danse et la
sexualité."23 The problem with these researches is that they have all been undertaken in
environments where the black male body is minoritarian and they often chart and discuss the
white gaze on the male body, but for the article at hand this literature will only make sense
further on, when the contemporary theatre scene in Europe will be discussed and the white
gaze on the black male body has to be taken into account. A useful instrument will be St.
Aubin, who has traced back the steps through which the male black body has been articulated
and constructed from the eighteenth to especially the nineteenth century.24 He presents what
he calls a "grammar" that has called into existence a presumed type of black masculinity that
still prevails in many contexts, the most dramatic being how it is still determining the way the
police forces in the United States regard and treat the black male body.
Since Connell, hybrid masculinity has been defined and inclusive masculinity has
been proposed as a possible model of non-toxic masculinity.25 A very interesting proposition
is made by Løvgren when she opts for a set of categories which she defines as Anxious
17
Connell, Masculinities,46, 67-71ff; Kassim Koné. "When Male Becomes Female and Female Becomes Male in
Mande." Mande Studies 4 (2002): 21-29; Sandra Bornand, "Le joueur de tambour d’aisselle est-il un homme ? ",
Cahiers d’études africaines 209-210 (2013): 6-10.
18 Viveros Vigoya, Les couleurs, Chapter 2 contains an annotated overview of studies on the subject.
19 Veviros Vigoya, Les couleurs, 70.
20
Viveros Vigoya, Les couleurs, 75.
21 Viveros Vigoya, Les couleurs, 168.
22
Donaldson, "What is hegemonic masculinity", Theory and Society, Vol.22, No.5 (1993):11.
23
Viveros Vigoya, Les couleurs, 107-135 on the image of black males in South America.
24
St. Aubin, "A Grammar of Black Masculinity." Journal of Men's Studies 10 no. 3 (Spring 2002): 247-270.
25
Bridges and Pascoe, "Hybrid Masculinities." Sociology Compass 8 no.3 (2014): 246–258; E. Anderson and
M. McCormack, 'Inclusive masculinity theory: overview, reflection and refinement.',Journal of Gender Studies.,
27 no. 5 (2018): 547-561.12
Young, Navigating, Patriarchic and Vulnerable Masculinities. 26 These categories are used
explicitly to evaluate existing literature on masculinities related to mass violence on the
continent, but I find these distinctions very useful in the context of West African society
(though I agree with her that "there is nothing specifically African about them"). The author
takes a critical look at the way African masculinity is presented in research and often detects
imperial and racist undercurrents in the academic viewpoints on the ways the link between
masculinity and mass violence are theorised. Her categories resonate with me as immediately
recognisable: especially when taken together as a complex, they offer a portrait of the way
challenges are dealt with that (young) men on the continent have to face on a daily basis: any
specific problem will be addressed taking the most adequate masculine stance that the
problem asks for. And Ratele adds the complicating but highly important socio-psychological
factor that masculinity in sub-Saharan Africa cannot be judged without taking into account
the intersection of gender and poverty/unemployment and the role played by age in the
shaping of masculinities.27 It is beyond the scope of this thesis but the fact that the young
male of colour who is spending his life under precarious circumstances, has turned into
perhaps the most marginalised and neglected member of the population, both on the sub-
Saharan part of the continent as well as in the diaspora.28
Perhaps this complex might be illustrative for the postcolonial state of affairs:
elsewhere I have emphasized the fact that hybrid does not suffice to characterise West
African society29 and cited Okeke-Agulu about artists' agency as a "compound consciousness
that constantly reconstituted itself by selective incorporation of diverse, oppositional or
complimentary elements"30 as the best way to describe the workings of West African society
as such.31 This compound beyond hybridity might be the most distinctive feature of the sub-
Saharan part of the continent and I would welcome an analysis showing that it is in fact the
most creative force operating not only in the lives of artists, like Okeke-Agulu argues, but in
the lives of the petit peuple as a whole. Imbrication seems the best word to describe the
essential characteristics of post-colonial West African culture. It is precisely in the act of
imbrication without causing conflict where agency operates. The elements that constitute an
imbricated construction will inevitably be very different within each local context, up to the
point of making it almost impossible to make comparisons and venture into generalisations. 32
An amusing and very telling example of this came up when I attended a traditional Moba
dance in pastoral northern Togo. The dancers were all middle-aged men with spears, as the
dance depicted hunting sequences; at the end of the dance, the men turned to the audience,
unexpectedly addressing the spectators collectively chanting "byebye." I felt quite sure this
word was not part of the regular Moba vocabulary and I checked with my Moba friend and
26
Rose Løvgren, Masculinity and Mass Violence: Ongoing Debates, Concepts and Trends. DIIS Working Paper
08 (2015): 6-20.
27
Koprano Ratele, "Analysing Males in Africa: Certain Useful Elements in Considering Ruling Masculinities",
African and Asian Studies 7 no. 4 (2008): 515-536.
28 "We worden gezien als roofdieren, hosselaars en mooiboys die overal kinderen maken". Don Moussa
Pandzou in an interview by Marijke de Vries in Trouw, 7 april 2021, 6-7. https://www.trouw.nl/verdieping/don-
moussa-pandzou-in-brussel-wemelt-het-van-de-expats-maar-mij-benaderen-ze-altijd-als-
nieuwkomer~b58424f7/
29 My MA thesis: Borrowers and Lenders: Exploring Contemporary Intercultural Theatre in Francophone
West-Africa. (Utrecht University, 2017).
https://www.academia.edu/34358846/Borrowers_and_Lenders_Javier_López_Piñón_pdf
30
Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria,
(Durham: Duke's UP, 2015), 11.
31 Svetlana Robailo Koudolo (in Egodi Uchendu, Masculinities in Contempory Africa/ la masculinité en Afrique
contemporaine (Dakar: Codesria, 2008): 88-109, investigating the acquisition of a standard masculine identity
in South Togo, tracks down the hybrid influences and forces that shape the process in this field.
32 Similar observations have been made by Chabal, Politics of Suffering, 42 in the field of political theory.13
colleague Marléne Douty, who had arranged the performance; he (Marléne is a traditional
Moba given name for a boy) confirmed that the group had inserted this anglicism to appeal to
the younger generations in their communities. This type of imbrication can be observed on a
daily basis in whatever community in sub-Saharan Africa.33
The lens through which I will look at recent performances that have explored
alternative masculinities might be somewhat unexpected: the local performance traditions in
(mainly Francophone) West Africa. The whole region is an extremely rich source for masked
ceremonies, trance rituals, in fact all sorts of theatrical displays of religious as well as profane
nature.34 Especially the masked performances show a wide array of types of masks:
anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, mixtures of the two as well as completely abstract ones. Now
the anthropomorphic masks very often perform paired in male and female types, but the
dancers are all (with a few very rare but well-documented and researched exceptions)
exclusively male.35
Research has shown that masks do not serve only to disguise the dancer when he is
representing another being: the masks in fact do not represent at all, they present. The dancer
is not to be considered disguised as a female spirit, the mask is the actual spirit incarnated, or
rather: the mask inhibits the dancer. Now this poses an interesting ontological question. If the
male dancer turns into a female spirit what kind of repercussion does this have on (his)
masculinity? A good example of this conundrum can be found in annexe II, an eyewitness
account of a ceremony in Sénégal among the Bedik people. When the specialist of the
ceremony was asked what the gender was of the male wearing the mask/costume embodying
a female spirit, after some confused reflexion, he replied that its gender was - the mask.
Discussing alternative masculinities means that we should also research the shape
alternative masculinities can or could take. Heterosexual relationships have a built-in a-
symmetry that sets them apart from homosexual relationships, for which the roles can change
and for which a-symmetries can be a choice made temporarily. Both the discussed
performances in Europe as well as the masked or trance performances in West Africa will
provide examples of "soft" or "vulnerable" masculinities and show a range of actions and
shifting identities. The masked performances often show a paradox that is interesting to look
into: fluid gender performance mostly functions to consolidate existing hierarchies between
the sexes, but this practice can undeniably also generate alternatives to the strict hierarchical
gender binary.
2.3 Hegemonic masculinity and homosexuality
The discourse on gender fluidity and alternative masculinities touches intimately on the issue
of sexuality and again it needs to be concluded, with Epprecht that we're dealing with "the
anglophone scholarship significantly dominating the francophone in quantity and in the
quality of its theorization of sexuality,"36 complicating the research at hand. Before looking
33
Frederick Lamp, See the Music Hear the Dance (Munich: Prestel, 2004), 98 on Dan masquerades: "[T]hrough
the incorporation of popular music into what they call a "traditional" performance form, performers express
identities simultaneously rooted in Dan tradition and cosmopolitan surroundings."
34 Bouttiaux, La Dynamique des Masques, 11-12.
35 Bouttiaux, La Dynamique, 17, analyses why women are most of the time excluded from the masked dance
practices.
36
Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 19.14
into the topic properly, I would like to explore the related issue of men having sex with other
men as a minefield to cross within the topic of hegemonic and alternative masculinities.
On stage, perhaps the epitome of hegemonic masculinity is the appearance in the
nineteenth century of the Heldentenor. In the preceding era when the opera seria reigned
supreme, ruling monarchs, army generals, revolutionaries, in fact all powerful men (provided
they were of noble birth) were equipped with a (mezzo)soprano voice that could tackle the
most vertiginous coloraturas.37 These iconic examples of masculinity were represented on
stage by the musico, the neutral word commonly used for the castrato singer. This was one of
the elements that illustrate gender fluidity in eighteenth century opera,38 although one might
confidently argue that gender fluidity already is a prominent feature in Shakespeare's work
and perhaps the phenomenon can even be viewed as constitutive of certain theatre practices
that are documented worldwide.
The disappearance from the operatic stages of the castrato singer at the beginning of
the nineteenth century marks a change in definition of masculinities that in my opinion (and I
follow Foucault in many respects) is linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie to the ranks of
power, leading to the hegemony of a specific view of masculinity that has reigned supreme
well into the next century, and is concentrated in the character of the Heldentenor in
nineteenth century opera.39 Towards the end of the twentieth century, the neo-liberal turn the
world has taken, has been accompanied by a profound shift in power relations that in turn has
started to affect that specific view of masculinity. The times present, i.e. the first decades of
the 21st century have produced a wealth of literature on the topic of masculinity (works by
Connell, Edwards, Viveros Vigoya have already been cited) and the debate is continuing at
its most interesting at the intersection with "race," sexuality and class (although it is
regrettable to observe that this last element within this context seems to become less and less
popular in academic discourse).
Hegemonic masculinity like it has developed in twentieth century Europe might look
very different in historical perspective. Taking the attitude towards same sex relationships as
an example, homophobia might well turn out to be a modern(ist) phenomenon.40 Recently,
visiting an exposition in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum on Roman Baroque art, I was struck
by the almost ostentatious display of homo-erotism, and I'm convinced it wasn't just my own
gay gaze that got into interpretative overdrive.
37
Marianne Tråven, "Voicing the Third Gender: the Castrato Voice and the Stigma of Emasculation in
Eighteenth-century Society," Études Épistémè 29 (2016): 17-18. https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.1220
38
Heather Hadlock, "Opera and Gender Studies," in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas
Till (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 264-267.
39
Susan Bordo, The Male Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 202.
40
within the discussion on homosexuality as an imported phenomenon in African culture, Epprecht and others
maintain that homophobia (especially its legal status) is the imported element, not homosexuality, that can be
traced from the arrival of the Europeans.15
Francesco Righetti/Dionysus and Amelos 1782 (photos JLP 2020. Garden of Haarlem
Provinciehuis, The Netherlands)
I often have speculated about how homosexuality has been regarded before it developed into
an identity during the twentieth century. The scarce existing historical sources show that the
ruling nobility could find solutions: the ample correspondence of his wife, Liselotte von der
Pfalz to her family in Heidelberg gives an interesting (albeit by definition very prejudiced)
intimate look into how her husband Monsieur, the brother of Louis XIV himself, arranged his
very homosexual practices into a kind of life at court, surrounded by a host of mignons. It did
not prevent him to father a son with his German wife (and she is very graphic in her
description on how he succeeded to perform in this respect), it was this very nephew who
became regent after the Sun King died. But the way things went in less loftier circles: we can
only get an unreliable glimpse through the lawsuits that have survived in specific periods.41
After Foucault's ground-breaking work, historical attitudes have been studied sufficiently
through what has now developed into gender studies (amongst many others: Saslow, De
Ruig, van der Meer).42 Studies on attitudes towards homosexuality in cultures outside the
hegemonic West however are (except for South Africa) scarce (but we do have Watanabe,
Epprecht, Murray and Roscoe, Parkinson).43
The research undertaken so far lead me to the concept that before homosexuality had
turned into an identity, same-sex practices used to be regarded as an option. In the classical
world, Greek/Roman mythology gives the right kind of examples of this attitude, great
womanizers like Zeus himself, activating his therianthropic faculty, had at least one same sex
41
Theo van der Meer, Sodom's Zaad in Nederland: Het ontstaan van homoseksualiteit in de vroegmoderne tijd.
(Nijmegen: SUN, 1995), 59-65.
42
James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (Newhaven:Yale UP, 1986);
R. de Ruig, In de schaduw van de grand seigneur (Utrecht: Himbergen, 1984) ; Theo van der Meer, De
wesentlijke sonde van sodomie en andere vuyligheeden: Sodomietenvervolgingen in Amsterdam 1730-1811
Amsterdam: Tabula, 1984).
43
Tsuneo Watanabe and Jub'ichi Iwata, The Love of the Samurai: a thousand years of Japanese homosexuality
(London: GMP, 1989); Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?; Sephen Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic
Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature (New York: NUY Press, 1997); Stephen Murray and Will
Roscoe, Boy-wives and female husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities (New York, St. Martin's, 1998);
Richard Parkinson, Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity across the World. (New York: Columbia UP,
2013).16
affair with Ganymedes, Dionysos with Ampelos, Apollo with Hyancinthus, the superman
Hercules with Hylas. An extreme example of gender transformation is when, in order to
seduce the nymph Calisto who is a member of Diana's following, Jupiter takes on the shape
of Apollo's sister 44 as Calisto only accepts female suitors. Whether same sex relationships
were acceptable or not is a disputed question in Egyptology but there is action to that effect to
be found in Egyptian mythology. Pantheons elsewhere, like in Haïtian vodou have their own
deities or spirits which include ambiguous or fluid sexuality (some manifestations of Baron
Samedi, Guede Nibo), the African vodun and Akan pantheon, Dogon as well as Shona
cosmology, all show examples of this too.45 In Murray and Roscoe the ethnonyms are listed
of the peoples where documented same-sex patterns exist.46 Six of the fifty odd peoples on
the list are inhabitants of contemporary Francophone West-Africa. Not all of them are as
convincingly documented as the Azande, where Evans-Pritchard in the nineteen thirties could
interview witnesses to a well-established tradition of same sex institutionalised marriages. In
rituals and ceremonies, the deities do not distinguish gender if they want to manifest
themselves: a female deity or spirit can just as well possess a male or a female mortal.
Observing attitudes towards the phenomenon in contemporary West Africa, I can see
confirmation of this idea of homosexuality as an option. Homosexuality as an identity is
almost impossible to realise in society and only attainable for the well to do, comparable with
how Louis XIV's brother arranged his life at Versailles. Rebucini has researched this aspect
for contemporary Moroccan society and his findings confirm this.47 He too signals a marked
difference between the classes in this respect. From my own experience, growing up in the
fifties of last century in my working-class environment, I remember that homosexuality was
regularly linked to class. A telling example is the often repeated saying I heard in Dutch:
"hoe groter geest, hoe groter beest", which can be translated as "the better the brain, the
dirtier the stain." The general belief being that MSM was all right for the well-educated but
had no place in working class circles.
Niang, in a revealing article, analyses the complexities of homosexual behaviour in
Sénégal, and his conclusions that "Traditional Islamic beliefs as well as beliefs relevant to
traditional African religions developed forms of acceptance of the goor-jigeen (Wolof word
for men-women -JLP) alongside formal doctrinal condemnation of homosexuality," 48 might
be an indication of the results of further researches on this topic on a wider geographical
scale,49 especially taking good notice of Niang's critical attitude towards implicit biases of
dominant linguistic and discursive categories.
The final common denominator is this matter is that men who sleep with other men
will plan to get married eventually, because the first and foremost duty of a male in this
region is to produce offspring, and it doesn't matter how the box is ticked. The prelude to
Chike Frankie Edozien's collection of tales Lives of Great Men (2017) is the eloquent
44 Thus providing the material for one of the most delightful operas of the 17th century: Cavalli's La Calisto.
45
Alain-Michel Boyer, Les Arts d'Afrique, (Paris: Hazan, 2006), 198, offers a list of androgynous or even
downright hermaphroditic deities that can be found with peoples scattered across the continent: Dogon, Urhobo,
Teke, Tchokwe, Songye, Baulé, Bongo.
46
Murry and Roscoe, Boy Wives, 279-282.
47
Gianfranco Rebucini, "Masculinités hégémoniques et "sexualités" entre hommes au Maroc." Cahiers d'études
Africaines, 209-210 (2013): 30-31. " Si les hommes des classes aisées, qui sont plus en contact avec la culture
européenne, assument plus ou moins complètement la vision identitaire et binaire occidentale, les individus des
classes défavorisées semblent majoritairement la modérer à la faveur d’une dichotomie hiérarchique instable,
analogique, homme/non-homme, ou moins-homme: l’opposition rajul/zamel."
48
Cheick Niang, "Understanding sex between men in Senegal: beyond current linguistic and dicursive
categories," in Routledge Handbook of Sexuality, Health and Rights ed. by Peter Aggleton and Richard Parker
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2010): 116-124.
49 For examples from the Islamic east coast: Murray and Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities, 225.17
personal illustration of this mechanism, and the collection contributes to support the idea of
same sex relationships as an option, although the homophobic environment often present on
the continent does not permit to regard this as a positive alternative. On almost every page of
this work, halfway between fiction and journalism, Edozien provides numerous examples of
the strategies followed to reconcile personal desire with societal constraint. Epprecht echoes
Murray and Roscoe when he maintains that "(...) the men and women who had same-sex
sexual relations most often also continued to marry, have children, and to engage in
heterosexual relationships as well." 50 He continues to quote (critically) from very early
European sources about cross-dress practices witnessed in Kongo and Angola and offers an
inventory of reported comparable activities in twentieth century ethnographic literature.
From personal experience I distinctly remember the first years I worked in Bénin, when at
every occasion the inevitable question arose about my status. Evasively, I explained that I
had a partner and 6 new children every year as this was the amount of new students we could
take into the Master course of which I was head of drama studies. This never went down
well, but it helped to stop questions.
Rachel Spronk, among others, has pointed to the non-applicability of the global
north's categories in the definition of sexual identity 51 and examples in West Africa (and
South) abound, in literature as well as in academic writing of how MSM often refuse to be
categorised as part of the LGBT+ community.52 The 1998 documentary Woubi Chéri about
gay subculture in Abidjan even introduces a special word, "yossi" for MSM that beside their
MSM behaviour have settled to a heterosexual family life with wife and children, a situation
in itself not seen as problematic: once the behaviour is labelled as homosexual, the problem
arises. The South-African feature film The Wound (2018) is very clear in this respect, when
the process of labelling leads to tragic events.
It might be argued that beyond identity discourses, developments at the beginning of
the twenty-first century are leading for the millennial generations to a return to the basic view
of homosexuality-as-a-option.53 The ostentatious display of gay culture during the
Amsterdam canal parade every summer has perhaps led to a reduced visibility of gay men in
everyday life. Despite my gay gaze, it has become virtually impossible to develop a properly
working gaydar as gay young men on the whole do not manifest themselves as gay in
outward appearance or behaviour anymore. Such ostentation no longer makes sense, and if I
would do my final exam for secondary school this year, I would no longer feel the need to
wear the black lace shirt and paint my index fingernail black like I did in 1969, when I was
eighteen years old.
So perhaps it is not surprising that Heldentenors are notoriously difficult to find
nowadays and that the range of the male voice during the last decades has extended upwards,
producing countertenors and sopranists, like in the old days of the musico, but luckily without
the need to resort to non-reversible operations.
50
Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa, 35.
51 Spronk, "Invisible Desires in Ghana and Kenya: Same-Sex Erotic Experiences in Cross-Sex Oriented Lives"
Sexualities 21 no. 5-6 (2018): 886.
52 Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows (Lagos: Black Sands, 2005), Laurent Bocahut and Philip Brooks, Woubi
Chéri (1998, FR/CI DVD ), The Wound directed by John Trengove (2018, SA, Artifilm DVD) all provide
examples of this non-categorisation.
53
Mark McCormack, "Intersection of Youth Masculinities, Decreasing Homophobia and Class: an
Ethnography" The British Journal of sociology 65 no. 1 (March 2014): 130-149.18
2.4 Observations on gender fluidity in West Africa
My many theatre projects in the region have recurrently confronted me with questions
concerning hegemonic masculinity in the context of decoloniality, tradition as well as
"tradition," sexuality (in most of the countries I have worked, homosexuality is still a
criminal offense), "race" and class (or perhaps inequalities is a better word). But where
anglophone Africa can boast an up to date and comprehensive library on these questions,54
francophone West Africa stays marginalised in academic literature. And masked ceremonies
being the province of anthropology (and only still too rarely of performance studies), not
much study has been published in this context about the way masculinity is interpreted,
displayed, transformed, veiled etc. (with the obvious exception of Thompson Drewal who
already devotes a chapter on Gender Play in her 1992 study on Yoruba ritual). From my own
experience as a stage-director I remember vividly a project in Togo where one of the actors,
Salomon Sanna, had to appear as a female spirit at a certain point in the play. I was happily
surprised to observe how comfortably the actor arranged to borrow on the spot make-up
products from his female colleagues and seriously started to apply to himself the make-up
needed to convince. This is just one of the examples to show that hegemonic masculinity in
West Africa might not wear the same face as it does in Europe or the US.
(photo JLP 2007. Lomé, Centre Fil Bleu)
Salomon Sanna in Machabées
Luckily, gender fluidity in the region has been researched in a number of cases: Koné
for the Bamana,55 Geoffrion for a number of Ghanaian students,56 Bornand for the Zarma in
Niger57 have all analysed gender fluidity as a specific element in performance practices and
even beyond. Geoffrion, in spite of the limited number of students she questioned for her
article, describes cross-dressing happening on a much bigger scale, and mentions celebratory
parties that allow for unproblematic cross-dressing. She explicitly concludes that through
talking to her students "I have discovered that their gender identities can hardly be seen as
54
a.o. Drewal and Thompson Drewal, Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1990); Thompson, Yoruba Ritual; Babatunde Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender, and social
Harmony in an African Culture (Seattle: University of Washington, 1996); Tamale, Sylvia. African Sexualities:
A Reader. (Cape Town: Pambazuka, 2011); Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa, Mark Epprecht, and S.N. Nyeck eds.
"Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, Citizenship" Sexualities 18 no. 1-2 (2015); Zethu Matabeni ed.
Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities.(Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2014).
55
Kassim Koné, "When male becomes female", Mande Studies 4 (2002): 21-29.
56
Karine Geoffrion, ""I Wish our Gender Could be Dual": Male Femininities in Ghanaian University Students."
Cahiers d'études Africaines 53 no. 209-210 (2013): 417- 443; "Ghanaian Youth and Festive Transvestism".
Culture, Health, Sexuality 15 no. 1(2013): 48-61.
57
Bornand, "Le jouer de tambour".You can also read
